Teenormous Turns Two – 140,000 Tees And Other Big Numbers

It’s hard to believe it’s already been two years since we launched Teenormous back on August 28, 2008. We initially set out to build a t-shirt search engine because we noticed there were a ton of great t-shirt merchants but no easy way to keep up with all the t-shirts available online. We hoped a few others might find this useful as well, but boy did we underestimate how many fellow t-shirt lovers there are! We’ve had a tremendous second year of growth, made lots of new friends in the t-shirt industry, and most of all, enjoyed every minute of it. Following on our one year update, we’d like to celebrate Teenormous turning two by sharing some of the highlights and stats of the past year.

Past Year Statistics

Teenormous had some impressive growth in the past year, far beyond our expectations. Our stats compare this years totals vs last years since t-shirt sales vary due to market seasonality with a huge spike around Christmas. As you can see in this Google Analytics image, in the past year we had:

• 2,442,793 Visits (+91.50%)
• 11,757,777 Pageviews (+121.34%)
• 4.81 Pages/Visit (+15.59%)

Current Monthly Statistics

This image shows our monthly stats for August, 2010. For the past month we’ve had:

• 229,337 Visits
• 1,225,530 Pageviews
• 5.34 Pages/Visit

As for Teenormous itself, we currently have 140,880 shirts indexed from 139 t-shirt merchants. We added 38 new merchants this past year. While many of our merchants are larger, more established t-shirt vendors, we also love to promote newer merchants just starting out. Of our active merchants, 55 have less than 50 t-shirts each and 22 have less than 10. Let’s hear it for the entrepreneurial spirit!

We continue to be blown away by the number of people using Teenormous to buy great t-shirts. In our second year, we’ve sent over $800,000 in t-shirt sales to our merchants. For the 2010 calendar year we’re on track to reach over $1 million in t-shirts sales just in 2010 alone. Below is a graph of sales for the last year.

As is typical with many retailers, a huge percentage of our year’s sales come around the holidays.

Site improvements

We’re always making improvements (both big and small) to the site. Here are just a few things we did over the past year to make the site better:

Categories: Sometimes you just don’t know what kind of t-shirt you are looking for. To provide some inspiration, over the past year we’ve put together an exhaustive list of popular t-shirt categories so you can just browse through our giant list of tees.

Helpful tips: As we managed Teenormous throughout the year, we started realizing we were learning things that can help merchants and designers sell more tees. We started writing these things down for others to learn from. We’ve only done two so far (How to get your t-shirt designs printed and Link other colors) and we do plan on writing more with the insight into the t-shirt biz that we have gained from running Teenormous.

Popular T-shirt Lists: In addition to categories, our growing collection of popular t-shirt lists is proving to be an excellent source for finding t-shirt ideas. We’ve released several new lists over the past year as well as kept all the current ones up to date as new t-shirts come in. Here are some of our favorite t-shirt lists:

• Funny Science T-shirts
• Best Dinosaur T-shirts On The Internet
• Funny Math T-shirts
• The Funniest Unofficial Star Wars Tees

Automation: On the backend of the site, everything is fully automated now so all the tees are updated at least once a week for every merchant on the site. We grab the latest and greatest tees and remove any that are no longer available for purchase. Our goal is to always show the latest selection of t-shirts you can buy online.

Thanks/Recognition

Teenormous wouldn’t be half as successful if it weren’t for the help of many others.  We’d like to send a heartfelt thanks to each of our incredible and growing list of t-shirt merchants, we couldn’t exist without you. We’d also like to thank all of our users and supporters for your continued feedback and support.

Additional Mentions

• We also must thank all the great artists and designers out there making awesome tees. In addition to sites like 80stees, Stylin Online, and MyTeeSpot that feature licensed tees, we also showcase many sites that sell indie/designer tees such as: Threadless, RedBubble, Psycho Reindeer, Rizzo Tees, Glennz, and many more.
• 37signals – Thanks for both RubyOnRails and Getting Real. Teenormous is built on RubyOnRails and we don’t think we could have executed as well as we have without it. As a team of two that maintains Teenormous in our spare time, Getting Real has proven to be a crucial guide book to follow for doing more with less, and focusing on what matters.
• We’d also like to give a shout out to some of the entrepreneurial bloggers who inspire us: Balsamiq, ASmartBear, Patrick McKenzie (of Bingo Card Creator and A/Bingo Testing fame) and Software by Rob to name just a few.

If you want to keep up with us, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and/or subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed to find out the latest on Teenormous, t-shirt giveaways and t-shirt coupon codes. We will be giving away free tees to our followers soon (starting tomorrow).

Zombie t-shirts!

We just posted our list of the best and most awesome zombie t-shirts we could find. Take a look and let us know what you think!

• Awesome zombie tshirts

One Year Of Tees – Over $400K In T-Shirt Sales Despite the Economy

Background

It was one year ago today on August 28th, 2008 that we launched Teenormous, our t-shirt search engine. We thought what better way to celebrate than to look back on the progress of Teenormous and share some of the more interesting tidbits about our growth.  This post is partially inspired by a few other entrepreneurs that we respect and admire.

First off, we’re just two average guys doing this part-time (we have “real” 9-5 jobs) with no funding and no financial backing. We are the owners, the coders, the marketers, the PR team, everything. The advantage of this is that our operating costs are next to zero and we only have to answer to ourselves. We use open source software and our only real cost has been our time, some money spent to hire a graphics designer for a few things, and web hosting fees with SliceHost (who is excellent by the way).

Statistics

In the first month of existence, we made a profit. A tiny profit, but a profit nonetheless. Just about every stat we can think of has gone up since then. Currently we’re hovering in the high 60Ks on Alexa and here are some other graphs of our traffic growth over the first year (click to enlarge):

Google Analytics

Compete.com

Highlights

• 1.44 million visitors
• 5.94 million page views
• 1.01 million t-shirt searches have been made this year
• We’ve sent over 460,000 t-shirt shoppers to our t-shirt merchants this year
• 74,921 shirts indexed

Our traffic grows each month but our current averages are:

• 190,000 visitors per month
• 750,000 page views per month
• 135,000 t-shirt searches per month

Top Searches

Here are some of our top searches of the past year in no particular order:

• Star Wars t-shirts
• Star Trek t-shirts
• 80s t-shirts
• Harry Potter t-shirts
• Video Game t-shirts
• Superhero t-shirts
• Geek t-shirts
• College t-shirts
• Transformers t-shirts
• Nintendo t-shirts

Money

It’s really interesting to us to see that in these financial times, people are still spending lots of money on t-shirts they find on Teenormous. We don’t have the ability to track every sale made through Teenormous. However, using very conservative estimates based on the sales we can track, we estimate we’ve sent over $425,000 in t-shirt sales to our t-shirt merchants this past year, and monthly sales rise nearly every month. Despite the economy, the t-shirt business is definitely booming.

Future Plans

So, what does the future hold for Teenormous? Well, we have no plans to abandon Teenormous. It has become successful much faster than we expected and we aim to keep the momentum going. Teenormous will continue to be the best place to find great t-shirts on the internet. We will be rolling in many more enhancements to the site over the next year to make searching for t-shirts even easier.

Thanks

Having said all this, we’d like to say a great big THANK YOU to all of our fans, the t-shirt community, the people that use Teenormous to find a t-shirt to buy and wear, and the awesome sites out there that sell so many great tees. We could not have come this far without you. We plan on adding even more great features to help you find the perfect t-shirt so stick around, we’re just getting started.

If there are any stats we left out that you are interested in or have other questions, ask them in the comments and we’ll try and update this post with the answer(s).

Tom and Brian
(The Teenormous Team)

100 T-shirt Giveaway

We’re giving away over 100 free t-shirts, coupons, and other prizes to celebrate us crossing the 60,000 shirt milestone! If you haven’t read about our giveaway, visit the free t-shirt contest page, read the instructions, then come back here to enter. Go now, we’ll wait here.

NOTE: You must put the link in the comment (not in the url section). You must put your email in the email field (not in the comment itself).

Teejunkie Designer of the Year Awards

Teejunkie has decided to do a T-shirt Designer of the Year Award and has hand-picked 25 of the best tee designers on the net. He’s leaving it up to his readers to decide the winner. Take a look and vote!

• Teejunkie T-shirt Designer of the Year Award